Free The Innocent Have Nothing to Fear by Stuart Stevens Page B

primary or caucus. It was an absurd way to pick the nominee of the party, but no one seemed to know any way to scrap the system and start over. It was like a rumbling giant airplane that had started out with a World War II frame—say, a B-17—and been constantly altered and modified to an unrecognizable state.
    “Oh great,” Shenkoph said. “We’re going to sue our own delegates to vote for our ass?”
    “They have to stick with us unless they want to die a slow and painful death,” Kim Grunfeld said.
    “We could threaten them with having sex with you,” Shenkoph said.
    “Cute.”
    “Half are women,” Eddie said.
    “All the better,” Kim said, without looking up. It was a subject of fascination to Shenkopf whether Kim was gay or straight. No one else seemed to care, but he had brought it up on more than one occasion. She knew it and loved to taunt him with whatever fantasies he might have. She walked over to the long table, which was filled with coffee and awful-looking pastries. She poured herself a cup of coffee and walked back toward her chair. As she passed Shenkoph, she poured most of the hot coffee into his lap.
    “Jesus Christ!” Shenkoph jumped to his feet.
    “Stephen Stills?” Kim read, ignoring Shenkoph. “Somebody likes Stephen Stills.” She looked up at Eddie. “He’s still alive?”
    In the bathroom, we could hear Shenkoph splashing water on the front of his rumpled suit, cursing in a low, steady stream. I looked at Lisa. We both tried not to laugh.
    “Mr. Ted Jawinski is a great fan of Crosby, Stills and Nash. He has been to over a dozen concerts.”
    “How do you know that?” Lisa asked.
    Eddie looked pained, like he had been asked how he knew that gravity really existed. “He writes about it on Facebook all the time. And he buys all their albums on Amazon.”
    “You have Amazon data?” I asked. This I didn’t know. “Is that legal?” Eddie shrugged. I let it drop. At this point, if Eddie had bought sex tapes from ex-boyfriends to use, I was all for it. That’s how campaigns work. You start out trying to win in the right way and end up trying to survive in the worst way.
    “This is creepy,” Kim said, a note of admiration in her voice.
    “You ought to see what Eddie has on you, Kim,” I cracked, and everyone laughed. Except Kim.
    I loved Eddie Basha. He was from the Mississippi Delta, a second-generation American of Lebanese extraction. He had the management skills of a COO of a major corporation and the soul of a very efficient assassin. I’d brought him in at the beginning, starting with that Wednesday in New Hampshire. We had worked together in over a dozen gubernatorial and congressional races and never lost. He was my good luck charm. We had met years ago in a special election to replace a congressman in north Mississippi who had resigned after cops caught him with his old high school girlfriend, both half naked, in a lovers’ lane parking spot outside of Pontotoc, Mississippi. Instead of trying to tough it out and beg for forgiveness, the congressman announced that he was resigning, divorcing his wife, and moving in with his old girlfriend. I always sort of admired that honesty. He was forty-two years old, took a look at his life, didn’t like it, and changed it. Now he was a high school football coach in North Florida, and I hoped he was happy.
    But that had opened up a congressional special election in a district that had been Republican and was likely to stay that way. I did what I did a lot of in those days: I went candidate hunting rather than waiting for somebody to call me. There were a couple of sort of wealthy candidates already in the race who had hired big-name consultants, which I certainly wasn’t. There were a couple of state representatives and one small-town mayor. But I had an idea—a sort of crazy idea, but I figured it was worth a shot.
    I flew down from D.C. to Memphis, rented a car, and drove to Oxford, Mississippi. It was summer and even